I don't know if I agree that 14 years is right, but I'm sure that pretty much everyone can agree that 1 year is too short, and 60 years is too long.
Why wouldn't this line of reasoning apply to physical property? Why can't I just go live in any house I want? Take any car I want?
Imagine I believe that depriving people of hypothetical profits is morally wrong. By the same logic, libraries are stealing from authors by depriving them of potential sales. Peaceful protesters are stealing from retail businesses by obstructing hypothetical sales. Municipal water suppliers are stealing from bottled water companies by depriving hypothetical sales.
My logic wouldn't have internal consistency with societal norms unless I accepted that creative production is somehow unique and special, and warrants special rules to protect hypothetical profits with the threat of lawyers and state-backed violence.
Still, let's assume I agree. There are many scenarios, illegal under intellectual property law, where the author/creator isn't deprived of anything, even a hypothetical profit. Consider that copyright lasts for 70 years after the death of the author. For 70 years, the author isn't deprived of even hypothetical profit, because they're already dead.
Personally, I always threw around 28 + 28 in my head (given that life expectancy in the 18th century was vastly different), with a slight twist: only the original copyright author can renew the term, and the copyright ownership in this context needs to be some sufficiently small group inventors. Anything owned by a corporation larger than X people won't renew.
So any potential transferral or relinquishing of ownership needs to at the very least appease the creator(s) so these corporations can get their other 28 years of their terms.
Another way to look at this: unlike physical property, what you pay for is the novelty. And that wears off.
>Another way to look at this: unlike physical property, what you pay for is the novelty. And that wears off.
In my eyes, I pay to show demand to the creator to keep doing this thing. We can certainly argue if authors get enough of this, but I don't think rewarding skilled labor is a "novelty".
Ideally, yes. In reality, far from it. Teaching and nursing are some of the easiest examples of how this structure is fundamentally broken.
>unlike a physical object or consumable material, the utility of this type of knowledge seem to lie in its novelty
Well we don't take the time to measure the long term output of knowledge. That's a fundamental problem that goes against your view. If novelty is the value and we remove that, knowledge is no longer valuable and thus, not rewarded based on its output. Your novel research on the next iteration of AGI is no more valuable than some AI slop that spits out a recipe for a cake. And incorrectly at that.
Does that sound like a structure that can support a non-post scarcity society?